Throughout every stage of the struggle for social change music has both fueled and united people and helped galvanize the movement. Marvin Gaye still keeps us asking “What’s going on?” James Brown helped teach people to be “Black and proud” and to “say it loud.” Song has been a communal act of expression that sheds light on injustices from slavery, to the Jim Crow segregation of the Civil Rights and Black Power era, to social the inequalities of today, and it has also served as a creative release.

Join the Institute’s Social Action & Leadership School for Activists in partnership with the DC Public Library’s Southeast Neighborhood Branch as they host Dr. Jared Ball for a seminar exploring the function of music as a fundamental feature of social change and how it’s become affected as part of a larger mass media structure. This multimedia presentation involves an investigation of U.S. music history, the inner-workings of the industry, and its evolution to hip-hop as media and cultural expression with the historical legacy of Black image and the hip-hop underground.